Is Jonathan Lethem Courting a 2009 Bad Sex Award With These Lines From ‘Chronic City’?

Later this month the Literary Review will announce the winner of its annual Bad Sex award, intended to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description … and to discourage it” in modern literary novels. Last year the judges gave the main prize to Rachel Johnson’s Shire Hell and a lifetime achievement award to John Updike.

Who will win the Bad Sex Award this year? Perhaps Jonathan Lethem for the following lines from Chronic City, a novel of New York during a financial – but not necessarily sexual — crisis. The excerpt below omits a half dozen lines, marked by ellipses, that might not cross the spam filters at libraries. You can find the missing lines by using the “Search Inside” tool on Amazon.com or another site to search for “Richard’s crotch throbbed.”

“At two that same morning he’d had Georgina swinging in a rope chair she’d had installed at his whimsical suggestion, hung from a bolted hook on her ceiling, her legs spilling over the sides of the mesh seat in which her splendid bottom lay helpless to his savage ministrations. The situation was wildly odd and erotic. …

knightofswords: Right. It may have been great sex, but you get no sense of it from the writing.

pseudoswashbuckler: And you have to wonder if sex in a hanging chair is even so “odd” by today’s standards …

Wonder if you’ll both think Lethem’s passage is better or worse than those that make the Bad Sex shortlist (to which I’ll post a link as soon as it becomes available)? What’s disheartening about this one from Chronic City is that it isn’t even grammatically correct because of the dangling modifier (“Remembering it, Richard’s crotch”). Some Bad Sex winners have been deeply purple or awkward but at least had no obvious errors.